The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown

by Geoffrey Household

  But God, according to Nadya, decided that they were too fortunate.

  ‘Fortunate? You?’

  ‘Well, we had lived through the winter. Fresh fish, David! Lots of it! And we were so used to death, like the soldiers.’

  So it was time for her to face her third frontier. The cousin, appalled by terror and counter-terror now that the defeated Germans had gone home leaving a vacuum behind, was determined to escape to Romania. He had useful friends down the River Dniester at Tiraspol. The French were holding the right bank of the river. The Reds, having abandoned Bessarabia, were in force on the left. Both were bogged down by the March rains and leaving each other in peace. While that lasted, any local man who knew the reed-beds and backwaters should be able to get across unchallenged.

  The cousin, the two children, a fisherman and his friend managed to cross the main stream in darkness and pouring rain, and were poling silently down a narrow channel between tall reeds. They were very near to the Romanian side when a star shell went up. Nadya remembered thinking how beautiful it was and how the boat and faces were suddenly striped by the black shadows of the thin screen of rushes—too thin or else the French only spotted the bending and waving of their tops. A blast of fire, first from the right bank then from the left, hit the supposed raiders before they could jump into the water. Nadya was the sole survivor. When all was silent she swam ashore and must have passed between French posts without ever seeing them. Her luck was nicely balanced. On the one hand she was unhurt; on the other, if anyone had made out a Russian girl crawling out of the mud into Romania she might have become a pet again and eventually joined her compatriots in Paris.

  Not that Romania treated the new arrival badly. When a kind-hearted family, ten miles back from the river, found her on their doorstep, she was hardly distinguishable as human except where the interminable rain had washed her. How she could have got that far without dying of shock and exposure she did not know. Her saviours quickly nursed her back to health and would have kept her if their own children had not been faced with hunger, for nothing but bits of men and horses had been sown on their land the previous autumn. Through the village priest a place was obtained for her at an Orthodox convent which was caring for the waifs and strays of Bessarabia. In that remote province which had been Russian and was now Romanian the bankrupt state had to leave it to charity to clear up the aftermath of war. The rescued girls were all alike in speaking Russian as their first or second language. What had happened to their parents it was pointless to ask.

  The Orthodox nuns sounded to Bernardo more worldly than Catholics but more distant. In their stiff, well-bred way they were equally kind to all their orphans within the limits set by crowded plank beds and scanty food. Education was severely practical. Those who could sit still were taught to sew and embroider; those who couldn’t tended the garden. Nadya and a few others into whose houses somewhere had come governesses and spectacled professors were taught by the Abbess herself, a tall, unbending lady of Byzantine family who in the vanities of the world could justifiably have called herself a Princess. Later on, Nadya was encouraged to give simple lessons in French and English.

  ‘And were you happy?’ Bernardo asked.

  ‘I was grateful. And it wasn’t bad among ourselves till I was twelve.’

  ‘Yes, I see. Your mother must have known?’

  ‘Of course. But the doctors were sure they would not grow, so we had no need to worry.’

  ‘And the nuns?’

  ‘They were distressed, David, and whispered. And if they didn’t, I thought they did. They wanted me to stay with them and become a nun. It’s hard to explain to you. As if I were a cripple. I was no use and could only serve God.’

  ‘Not much of a compliment to God!’

  She stared at him as if trying to work out this little squib of impiety where there should be none.

  ‘I could give praise like anybody else,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean hymns. There was so much in the open air I loved.’

  And not much inside the nunnery, he supposed. He could fill in a lot of what she had felt and was trying to express. At her age he had not been aware of missing anything of value. But in Spain why so much lonely and sometimes ecstatic walking over coast and mountain when he had plenty of friends with whom to appreciate a rich, very ordinary life?

  ‘How did you get out of the place?’

  She gave him the facts very honestly but was evasive about her motives. He had to put some solid flesh on her privacies when he was alone to think about them. There had been the usual black-robed, hairy, Orthodox priest wagging his whiskers at the nuns, and he had a son. Bernardo imagined—with little more than a scatter of exclamations to go on—a not too flashy, straight-haired Romanian youth with fine eyes and one of those wide, mobile mouths which could gain sympathy even for an irresponsible liar. He must have been fascinated by her face, for her shape was odd however tight the nuns packed her, or perhaps any sort of body would do and he was just taking advantage of her longing to be loved again. At any rate he got her away most romantically in a motor cycle and sidecar borrowed from a friend. When they were beyond easy recovery and on the willowed bank of one of those laughing Romanian streams, he made the first idyllic exploration of her body. Up to then there had been only passionate words and brown eyes married to grey over the wall of the convent. He was shocked beyond measure. He panicked. He drove off and left her.

  She stayed where she was. At least when she crawled ashore from the Dniester she carried with her the one certainty that she was a child who had been loved. Now she was a horror to herself. So far as the destruction of a human personality went she would, Bernardo thought, have been better off, for a time at any rate, if she had been a normal girl, seduced, abandoned and finishing up in the Crucea de Piatra.

  Though ashamed of it, he found that he could understand that hysterical Romanian lad. Why on earth hadn’t she warned him that she was different from other women? Starry-eyed innocence? Or an assumption that he must know what all the convent knew? Or could she conceivably have thought that what was a slightly prurient indelicacy to silly nuns offered an extra richness to the love of a man? And one might fairly safely guess that, added to any one of these, her experiences of death and filth and starvation had taught her too thoroughly that the state of the physical body was unimportant where there was deep affection.

  What happened then was that Stepanov found her. How did he find her? She couldn’t face that question. She said it was a coincidence. It was very obvious to Bernardo that the priest’s son, either from remorse or in hope of profit, had let Stepanov know of her existence and that the eunuch had at once gone off to search for her. At any rate Stepanov, who up till then had earned a poor living exhibiting foetuses in bottles, took her home to his village unresisting as if death had once more refused her.

  When they started on the road together in the spring she was Stepanov’s daughter. His village headman must, like Rabbi Kaplan, have had the ear of a police officer who could not be bothered with the peculiarities of pious Jews and voluntary Russian eunuchs and was ready to hand over any papers required if the hand were greased.

  ‘He was kind to you?’

  ‘Yes. He used to say it was a punishment for the sins of the flesh.’

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘No. Lots of generations. It wasn’t my fault at all.’

  ‘You mean—it was almost as if he had caught a devil in a trap and was exhibiting it?’

  Again she gave him her shocked look which this time brightened into amused comprehension.

  ‘Something like that. Yes, with a tail! We could have poked it down my trousers.’

  For that night Nadya occupied his bed while he was on duty and then cleared off to buy clothes. Stepanov’s three days’ takings, she said calmly, would easily pay for her return to femininity as soon as she saw what townswomen were wearing. One wouldn’t have believed there was so much lecherous curiosity in Giurgiu.

  Bernardo slept till midday
and then jumped to his feet with a nagging sense of guilt before he had made up for his sleepless night. He did not know what the hell to do with his acquisition. He had no money to feed both of them; he was as irresponsible as her disgusting boy-friend; and he knew nothing about Russians except for a few second-rate dancers at the Principesa who claimed, often with truth, to have been trained at the Imperial Ballet School and were all big eyes and sorrow. Nadya was a bit like that herself, except that she never showed sorrow, only acceptance.

  There should be a dying swan in her hotel bedroom at the moment. She never got up till the afternoon. Bernardo had no right to wander upstairs when off duty, so he waited in a bar at the end of the street till the clients began to drift out of the hotel alone or in couples. A damned flashy, vulgar lot, he decided. The Nyroubova was different. She looked like any young working girl going home from the office in a neat black coat, a white fur hat and a little scarf flowing at the neck. He bowed respectfully and asked if stars of the ballet had any objection to taking a drink with the night porter. Not at all, she replied, with this particular night porter.

  He told her of a refugee he had come across, stateless and destitute. He wanted to help her, but had no idea what he ought to do and nor had she. Nyroubova just laughed at his innocence. Surely he, a cosmopolite, didn’t believe that Russians were incompetent? She could not tell him off-hand what committee was looking after refugees in Bucarest, but since scores of them had entered Romania when the Turks decided that Istanbul had enough of them, there must be some efficient organisation. He was to send Nadya Philippovna Andreyev up to her room just as soon as he could get hold of her and not to worry any more. She gave him a kiss on both cheeks and thanked him. He left her in a daze of relief, never having realised the freemasonry of White Russians or that it would be so easy to return Nadya to her true identity. He wished to God there was something similar for English refugees from Hungary.

  V

  Despina

  It was due to Mme. Hortense, of all the unlikely people, that Bernardo was offered the job of stage manager at the Alhambra. He had never realised that she was a great lady of the cabaret world. As a Frenchwoman of past fame her prestige on the near-eastern circuit was matchless. She knew how things were run in Paris and flatly refused to be engaged by any establishment which was full of putains. Her associates could be as spectacular as they pleased at lunchtime, but when the show was over their movements must be seemly.

  Mme. Hortense had been impressed by Bernardo. He had saved her with courtesy from a minor scandal; also she had beaten down his price and was always generous in victory. His French was much too good for a mere night porter and could be listened to without flinching. In fact he was just the sort of scoundrel who could be trusted to behave like a gentleman in a frequently disgusting profession. There was also the question of his kindness to that adorable, fat, little Russian always in and out of Nyroubova’s room whom Mme. Hortense overwhelmed with chocolates and embraces. Nadya had spoken of this to Bernardo with some alarm, but it was needless. In such an emotional flurry of bosoms, double the normal size could safely be mixed with double the normal number.

  Ion Stelian, owner of the smart Alhambra, wanted a foreigner for the job but was not allowed to import one; he had to employ a Romanian though he had no exaggerated opinion of his own countrymen when in charge of a menagerie of attractive girls. It was natural that he should consult Mme. Hortense. Had she by chance run across anyone who would be acceptable to distinguished artistes such as herself? She had and could recommend him.

  Bernardo Brown, badly wanted by several countries and known to have reached Romania, should never have accepted so public an employment; but he was not in the forefront of David Mitrani’s mind as often as he had been. The fact was that Bernardo, once out of immediate trouble, was always inclined to dream of the future—in some ways an excellent habit for a criminal, preserving him from depression though offering golden opportunities to the police.

  But the job seemed as safely obscure as that of night porter at the Principesa, so he took it. He supervised the back rooms and the back door and rarely had reason to go into the hall when the show was on. His duties were in fact quite lowly, not to be compared to those of a true stage manager, for there was no stage, only one and a half dressing rooms, and Stelian himself together with the maître d’hotel ran everything of any importance.

  Enquiry into his antecedents was perfunctory. The Principesa was obviously sorry to lose him, and the Prince of the Rosicrucians gave him a magnificent reference for tact. Bernardo stuck to his story of coming out to Romania with a horse, said nothing of the Crucea de Piatra and admitted his conversion. Again it was considered a recommendation that he was a Jew so long as he was a Christian.

  A very bold move, especially since he was required to use far more broken English than he had dared so far. But he had to earn more money in order to settle Nadya. Nyroubova had at once booked a small room in the hotel for her and started the process of establishing her identity. That had been far simpler than expected. The Abbess confirmed that she had been picked up in Bessarabia after escaping across the Dniester, adding that her character was not recommendable and that she suffered from a physical disability. The good Russians were not impressed by that. Which of them after years of poverty could claim a spotless character and which had not some disability? As to what she had been doing since she left the convent, that was easy to answer; she had been assisted by a certain David Mitrani. Mr. Mitrani wrote highly of her in impeccable French, emphasising that his relationship with so defenceless a girl had always been that of brother and sister.

  In the hotel Nadya had had difficulties and very narrow escapes. Apart from her own natural shyness it was essential to avoid gossip leading inevitably to the tragedy of Giurgiu. So Bernardo found a ground-floor room for himself with a bedroom above for her, and no questions asked about their sharing of a bathroom. She would have to wait a long time for her Nansen Passport, but so long as she remained in Bucarest her civil status was clear and no authority was likely to bother her. The only essential precaution was to avoid being seen by any fashionable cabmen from Stepanov’s village.

  The short ferocity of Romanian winter was soon on them, the chill, clear December days suddenly changing to a north-east blizzard straight from the Urals which seemed to Bernardo to cut him lengthways into two halves of a frozen carcase; he huddled over the tiled stove of his room trying to unite them by draughts of hot tsuica while Nadya laughed at him. She was working as a waitress in a newly opened Russian restaurant where the squareness of her figure and the saintly beauty of her face fascinated Romanians and foreigners alike who saw in her the typical peasant of Russian literature and were generous with their tips.

  In summer the land belonged to the Europe of the Danube. In winter it was unique: a Latin Russia. When the blizzard was over, the main streets and boulevards were cleared but the outskirts of the city were silent under the snow. The smartest of the eunuch drivers substituted runners for wheels and waited to be hired beyond the boundary of the sweepers where the trasura and its pair of black horses could take the fur-coated passengers—usually one of each sex—hissing over the roads to the inn or restaurant of their choice. The gaiety of indoor life was less languorous than the willow-patterned ease of summer. The gipsy bands were wilder. Game, from bear to snipe, was abundant even in the cheaper restaurants. The winter season at the Alhambra was lavish with women and song.

  The stars were a pair of French twins, weighing together little more than Mme. Hortense and bringing to Bucarest the latest hits of Josephine Baker. Most exotic of all—from the Romanian point of view—was Miss Lou, an angular but graceful American in a short, Greek tunic who sailed round the floor from pose to ecstatic pose expressing the joys of spring—or it might have been summer—in well-meant imitation of Isadora Duncan. The rest of the artistes were Hungarian with only one Romanian, employed for her tall, calm loveliness rather than her dancing which was of little more
than graceful ballroom standard.

  Bernardo enjoyed himself back stage, not in the least jealous of the oilmen, minor diplomats and foreign business men on whom the Alhambra depended for its profits, since it was too expensive for all but a few Romanians. He was ironically amused by the façade and its complete falsity and remembered both with pleasure.

  ‘Inevitably at my age,’ he admitted, ‘one feels a certain nostalgie de la boue. They were all floating and feminine then—none of this tedious nakedness designed to give the salesman the illusion that he can still feel the same excitement as he did at sixteen. Or perhaps he does. I can see the time coming when we’ll get more kick from dressing a girl than undressing her.’

  It was a night soon after the Orthodox Christmas when David Mitrani, idly watching the show from the obscurity of the artistes’ entrance, was suddenly backfired into the torments of Bernardo Brown. The band was changing its music for the Viennese froth which suited Despina Vladimirescu, the Romanian dancer, and only the yappings and hummings of conversation sounded in the hall. Over this background a clear tinkle of high-pitched laughter easily carried. It must be Magda. Nobody else could manage that crystal note of provocative enjoyment. The sound came from a shaded box on the dais which ran round half of the Alhambra. Across the glare of top lights over the floor he could not see with certainty who was in it; a quick dodge behind the band gave him a better view. The pair were Sigismund Pozharski and Magda. She was leaning forward, murmuring something to the distinguished white head and altogether too close to it. The air of intimacy, of flirtation even, could not be mistaken. Bernardo told himself fiercely that a reasonable warmth was to be expected when she was being taken out by one of her father’s old friends.